


Drug out to Sea

by thepartyresponsible



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Not Canon Compliant, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-27 02:34:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14415768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepartyresponsible/pseuds/thepartyresponsible
Summary: It wasn’t supposed to be Peter. Out of all of them, it wasn’t supposed to be him.Tony thinks it is absolutely, fundamentally, laughably unfair that when a hole in the sky took Tony, he got to fall back to grace. But when it took Peter, it kept him.





	Drug out to Sea

**Author's Note:**

> I'm already sorry. I have no excuses for my actions, but I do have an explanation. I was trying to prepare myself for Infinity War by doing the old "Well, what's the worst thing that could happen?" mental exercise that I'm pretty sure has never actually helped anyone ever, and my brain said, "Well, what if Peter dies but Tony doesn't?" And it was so terrible that I had to write it, and now I'm sharing it with you, and I'm sorry. There's no happy ending. Fair warning. 
> 
> Title taken from "Lay Low" by Shovels & Rope, because "I probably should be / drug out to sea / where I can't hurt no one, / and no one can hurt me" feels like it fits.

          There is some time, after, that Tony loses. _Shock_ , he thinks, when he finds that the edges of _before_ don’t quite meet up with the edges of _now_. The last thing he remembers is Peter, not screaming. Peter, and that hole in the sky.

          And then, nothing. And then, after that, Clint Barton, crouched in front of him, using a tone that wants to be a yell but can’t be, because he’s holding a baby in his arms.

          “---damn it, Tony,” Clint’s saying, when the rubberband snaps and throws Tony’s mind back into his body, “take him. Wake _the fuck_ up, and take him.”

          “What?” Tony says, but he doesn’t do it right, forgets to unclench his teeth and open his mouth. “What?” He says again, properly, coordinating all the disparate parts of himself so he can speak, like a person, like a functioning human being.

          “Nate,” Clint says, and hands the baby to Tony. “Take him.”

          Tony fumbles and brings his arms into some approximation of the careful way he’s seen other people hold babies. The kid stares up at him, docile and sweet, and Tony almost throws up all over him.

          “No,” he says, trying to give the baby back. “Clint, for fuck’s sake. What are you doing? Take your kid. What the hell are you---”

          “Where have you _been_ , Stark?” Clint says. He’s angry. Below that, he’s scared. Tony hasn’t seen him scared like that, ever. “I can’t find them. I can’t find Laura, and Cooper, and Lila. I can’t find my _family_.”

          “You can’t leave me with a baby,” Tony says. “I haven’t even taken a paternity test.”

          “Your bullshit jokes come back, but not your brain? Goddamn, Stark, you’re terrible in a crisis.” Clint looks disgruntled, but, when he fixes Tony’s hold, his hands are careful. And then he puts a hand on Tony’s shoulder, squeezes, and his eyes are sad, and worried. “Tony,” he says, “I have to go. I need you to keep your shit together, okay? That’s my son in your arms. I need you to look after him.”

          “Stay here,” Tony says, desperate. Clint sighs like he’s disappointed, and Tony shakes his head. “No, stay here with your kid, and I’ll go. I’ll find them.”

          “Electrical grid’s still down in that part of the world.” Clint steps away, shakes out his shoulders. “If it comes back, I’ll call you. Until then, I’m better at ground work than you are.”

          Clint leaves, and Tony’s brain runs hot in his head like an overtaxed processor. He needs to throw up; he needs to move, find cover, pop dual handfuls of Xanax and Valium, and sleep until the world finally finds some mercy and ends.

          The baby gurgles and fists a hand in Tony’s shirt.

          “Hey,” Tony says, soft, and bounces his arms a little. “Hey,” he says again, “don’t worry. He’s coming back.”

          There’s a flash in his head, a memory strong enough to overwrite reality. Peter, screaming. Graceless and hurt. Desperate, guttural, ugly. Screaming like he’s being ripped apart. Like he’s _scared_.

          And then Peter, not screaming.

          Tony breathes in hard, gets air back in his lungs and reminds himself, forcefully, that he’s on the ground, back to a loadbearing wall in what remains of his tower. In his arms, the kid fusses and then, eventually, sleeps.

          It wasn’t supposed to be Peter. Out of all of them, it wasn’t supposed to be him.

          Tony thinks it is absolutely, fundamentally, laughably unfair that when a hole in the sky took Tony, he got to fall back to grace. But when it took Peter, it kept him.

          Peter, screaming. And then Peter, not screaming.

 

 

 

          “Stark.” The voice is careful. Neutral. It’s a threat, and it’s too close.

          Tony flinches awake, arms curling around the baby that Barton, Father of the Goddamn Year, left in his supremely unqualified care. “Fuck off,” he says, before his eyes are fully open. “Get the fuck out.”

          “Hey,” Barnes says. He’s still got that Eeyore-ish look to him, all small, miserable frowns and sad eyes, and Tony would punch him in the face, but he’s not sure he can hold the baby with one arm. Babies seems like the sort of thing that should demand redundancy, require failsafe upon failsafe. “Steve’s on his way.”

          “Oh, good,” Tony says. “Impeccable timing, as usual. The master tactician strikes again. Does he get off on being too late to do anyone any Goddamn good?”

          Barnes grimaces like he wants to fight about that, but he just jerks his chin toward the baby, instead. “Who’s the kid?”

          “Barton’s,” Tony says. “What, you guys not talking to him now, too?”

          Barnes shrugs. “Communication’s been a challenge.” He’s let his hair grow out. Tony thinks, mean and spiteful and all kinds of uncharitable, that he looks homeless. After what happened in Wakanda, maybe he is.

          “Tony?”

          Tony’s been bracing to see Steve, but it’s May Parker, instead. She’s standing in the doorway, hand curled around the doorframe, and she looks like she’s been through hell. Her hair’s everywhere, and her clothes are dirty. Her _face_ is dirty.

          She’s been crying.

          Tony knows why she’s been crying. He wishes, for her sake, that the news feeds had cut out just five minutes earlier.  

          But then he’d have to tell her. So it’s better this way, maybe, because he hasn’t even been able to form the words in his own head yet. He has no idea how he’d manage to say them to her.

          “You son of a bitch,” she says. There’s so much rage in her. Even Barnes pulls back, turning to face her, rolling the shoulder with the cybernetic implant like he’s gearing up for a fight. Like he thinks he’s going to brawl with May Parker, all five and a half feet of her.

          “You _asshole_ ,” she says. It’s softer this time. It sounds like she’s running out of air.

          Like Peter ran out of air, if he lived that long. If he wasn’t already dead with the sky closed up behind him.  

          Screaming, and then not screaming, and Tony hasn’t asked for the data yet, isn’t ready to know if the suit was still detecting a pulse before it stopped transmitting. He hopes the kid died here, on the earth side of the portal. He doesn’t want to think about Peter dying so far away from home.

          May starts toward him, and he scrambles to his feet. The baby hiccups and then howls, and Tony passes him to Barnes without thinking. Barnes takes the kid and disappears, clears the area, and Tony’s never been particularly thankful for Barnes’ habitual flight response, but he’s grateful, this time, in this moment.

          He thinks she’s going to slap him, but she doesn’t. She punches him, closed fist, right in the mouth. He could deflect, but he doesn’t. She deserves this. _He_ deserves this.

          “You son of a bitch,” she says, again. Louder now, and it’s terrible. Her voice is terrible. There’s too much in it, and Tony hates her for it, a little, the way she’s bleeding emotion all over the place, and he’s just trying to stay calm, just trying to maintain some semblance of fucking dignity here, and keep all of it buried deep, where it belongs, where he can control it.

          She curls her fingers up like she’s going to hit him again. “He was my only family.”

          Tony’s brain flips over, stutters its way through old memories. Small hands building towers, building sandcastles, the first time he held a soldering iron, the first circuit he built. _It’s not retreat_ , he thinks. Same as he did when they held his head underwater in Afghanistan, when the palladium poisoning was spreading across his chest, when he had to override the selfish flinch response that made him want to abort the flight with the nuke. _Go somewhere else, go back, go somewhere else, go somewhere better_.

          Go back to where he had control and stay there until he has it again.

          There are hands scrambling across his face, and there’s a distant thought that maybe he needs to deal with this, maybe she’s going to claw his damn eyes out, but then they curl around the back of his head, and she tugs his face against her shoulder.

          She’s shaking. He knows because she’s holding onto him, and he knows because he’s holding onto her. They’re both shaking, maybe. But so long as he has his arms around her, he’s got plausible deniability.  

          “He was all I had.” Her voice is soft. He can feel her tears against his skin. “He was my entire family.”

          “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

          _Peter’s dead. I let him die. I got him killed. I brought him to a war he couldn’t win. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I did this. I’m sorry._

          She shakes her head, and her arms tighten. “I know,” she says. “I know you are.”

          All his life, Tony has understood forgiveness as the thing that - sometimes, if he’s lucky - follows anger. It comes after all that rage has burned itself out, desiccated into ash that he can brush away, if he’s careful. He earns it, or he doesn’t, and it’s given, or it isn’t.

          May’s shaking in his arms. She’s furious, and she’s forgiven him already, and he has no idea what to do.

          Tony doesn’t even deserve to share a planet with this family, and now he’s gutted them, killed half and destroyed what’s left, and he wants to pull away from her, but he can’t. He can’t make his hands let go.

          He’s a selfish, stupid, toxic bastard who corrupts or kills everything he touches. He should let her go. He can’t.

 

 

 

          “Tony, are you—uh.” Steve’s stalled in the doorway. He looks stunned, and uncertain. There’s dirt on his hands and dried blood on his uniform, his boots, his face. He throws a desperate glance Barnes’ direction, and Barnes skews his mouth up in a way that doesn’t make much sense to Tony but seems to clarify something for Steve. “Ma’am,” Steve says, carefully.

          “Oh,” May says, stepping away from Tony. She flicks the tears off her face with her thumbs, and her hand is only trembling a little when she holds it out to him. “Captain.”

          “Ma’am,” he says, again, a little helplessly. He shakes her hand and then looks at Tony, over her shoulder. “I’m just Steve Rogers now, actually.”

          “Sure,” she says, in a way that implies she will call him whatever she damn well wants to. “It’s, you know. An honor to meet you. Peter really admires you. Admired. _Shit_.”

          She wavers for a second, and all three of them, useless cowards that they are, visibly draw themselves up. Then she clears her throat and gestures toward the baby in Barnes’ arms. “Whose kid is that? He needs to be changed.”

          “Barton’s,” Tony says, and Steve’s face contorts in a way that Tony could swear was relief, if relief made any damn sense. “He’s looking for the rest of his family. He left that one with me.”

          “Interesting choice,” she says. Her tone is a mercy, because she could’ve twisted those words into a knife or a Goddamn atom bomb, but she just says it in a way that implies, fairly, that Tony’s probably never held a baby in his life.

          “I’ll get diapers,” Tony says. Most of his suits are gone. He made more after the Avengers fell apart, to replace some of the skills he’d relied on the others for, but there hadn’t been enough, when he needed them. He has far fewer now. Still, he calls one of the few he has left.

          “This the sort of thing you need a suit for?” Steve asks, evenly, as Tony disappears behind his armor.

          “You been outside much, Cap?” Tony says. “Ms. Parker is usually impeccably dressed.”

          Steve looks at May, at the dirt on her face and dust coating her clothes, and then looks back to Tony. “I’ll come with you.”

          “I’d rather get murdered by looters,” Tony says, breezily. It’s easier, with the faceplate between them. Steve recoils and then locks his jaw, and Barnes and May share a look that is endlessly unfair, since they just fucking met and haven’t even spoken a word to each other.

          Tony doesn’t want to deal with this. He doesn’t have to.

          May Parker can forgive people before she’s done being angry with them. The Parker family, he thinks, consists solely of saints. The Stark line runs strongly the other direction.

          Tony leaves them there, in his tower, with a baby. Friday pulls up data, and he lets himself be distracted by it.

          Outside, New York is a seething mess of rolling blackouts and millions of people who’ve just escaped the apocalypse. It’s hard to tell the difference between the street parties and the riots. Tony finds a corner store where an old woman sells him half an aisle of baby-related supplies with an actual shotgun lying casually over her lap.

          “Cops catch you with that,” he says, pointing at the gun, “and I will not be a character witness.”

          She smiles at him, wry and endearingly unimpressed by the Iron Man armor. “If I needed you as a character witness,” she says, “I’d have bigger problems than a few weapons charges.”

          It startles a laugh out of Tony. He wonders how much of the news she’s seen, how much she knows about what kind of character he has.

          “Fair enough,” he says. He pays her, and leaves.

          Rhodey catches up with him halfway back to the tower. Drops out of the sky to fly beside him and cocks his head to the side as War Machine’s visual feed identifies the items in Tony’s shopping bags. “You pick up a kid?” He asks, steady as always.

          “It’s for the Hulk,” Tony says. He doesn’t know who on the planet would have the time, skills, or resources to run surveillance on him right now, but he’s not going to tell the whole world that Barton’s kid is at his tower.

          “Sure,” Rhodey says.

          They drop the supplies off at the tower. Literally drop, because Tony’s an asshole at every possible opportunity. He leaves them out on a balcony, and has Friday tell Steve where they are.

          “We avoiding Cap?” Rhodey asks, as Tony launches himself back toward the city.

          “Got a whole world to clean up,” Tony says. “Cap can babysit if he wants. I’ve got work to do.”

          Peter, he thinks. Screaming, and then not screaming. Yeah, he’s got no damn business babysitting.

          He wonders what kind of world is left. He wonders if it was worth it. He weighs it out, measures what remains against what was lost. May Parker’s shaking hands against Peter Parker’s bright smiles, Cap’s squared shoulders against Peter’s endless curiosity. Barnes’ silence against Peter’s screams.

          It doesn’t matter. There’s no meaningful comparison, no way to break the variables apart.

          It wasn’t supposed to be Peter, but it was. This isn’t the world any of them wanted, but it’s the one they have left.

          He’ll do what he can. There’s a chance, next time, it will be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're sad now, think about this: I was originally going to write a much longer fic based on this idea. And Peter was going to get picked up by the Guardians and adventure around the cosmos for awhile before coming back, and Steve and Tony were going to slowly figure their way back to some kind of steadiness, and there was a whole arc where Bucky and May are amazing and kind of hold everything together. 
> 
> ...I'm _sorry_. This was all that wanted to be written, and the movie comes out in three days. Let this be a lesson to everyone about the importance of time management.


End file.
